Virginia Tech

I am seeing this now, rightly or wrongly, as an immigrant's story. My heart bleeds for this kid, caught between two cultures, isolated, the question mark. His parents working all hours to make a life. He has no one to talk to, fits in nowhere, and it just spirals downward until he snaps. That these pressures, these traumas, at least aggravated and finally destroyed a psyche that was already fragile. Take this terribly, worryingly, pathologically shy kid, born into a culture that is achievement-driven and ashamed of weakness, make him an alien, isolate him, separate him from his family...

The no-one-reaching-out-to-him, I tend to buy that too. But then his roommates sure sounded like they tried, and longer than I would've done. Still, maybe no one had time or cared enough to try hard enough. (Fr. Flanagan: "There are no bad boys.")

I bleed for his parents, too, and the immigrants' dilemma; the terrible cost. And it makes me feel guilty for how easy I've had it.

But what about the evil that can curdle self-pity? The choice for that?

One of the Korean pastors quoted in the paper had the courage to tell his congregation that the potential for such evil is in all of us, that "I am not so different from Cho. The father of one of the victims had the courage and compassion to call for prayers for Cho's parents, "for they too have lost a son." Some of the VT students had the strength to resolve that "we need to reach out to the loners."

Surely the voice of Christ is from these, and from Lucinda Roy, who noticed the crying behind the sunglasses and tried to help, scared as she was, and not from Nikki Giovanni, who could not see beyond the "meanness," the "weirdness," the "crap," or Leonard Pitts, who wrote "I don't want to understand this pathetic kid."

The Witch is Dead

The horror at Virginia Tech has chased the Imus “scandal” off the stage. I told myself that I wouldn’t spend a moment of my life thinking about the demise of this puerile bloviator, but then found myself drawn to columns by Frank Rich, Bob Herbert, and E.J. Dionne, among others, and a Time cover story on the debacle.

These stories came after the initial wave, and in response to it. There were endless tropes:
--The hypocrisy of the corporations, Imus’s employers, who remained silent until they could gauge the level of public outrage, then cut the guy loose.
--The hypocrisy of those Imus pals who now condemned Imus (again after sniffing the wind) after having profited from “looking the other way” for so many years.
--The hypocrisy of those who crucified Imus for using language that black rappers use, with impunity, every day. (“Prison culture,” one African-American commentator called it.)
--The hypocrisy of Imus’s delayed-onset apologetics.
--The hypocrisy of Al Sharpton.
--The despicable unfairness of a media superstar randomly disparaging a group of heretofore anonymous young women. (This is what “did it.”)
--Imus’s redeeming qualities, grudgingly allowed.
--The frat-boy ugliness at the core of Imus’s act. (Somehow, Imus’s actual physical ugliness—his baleful hawk-like visage, the Wicked Witch of the West in a cowboy hat—was left untouched. There were many mentions of his advanced age and irrelevance.)
--The idea that this incident would or should “re-open” a discussion of race relations in the U.S. (Sure it will.)
--The idea that PC is dead, and there’s something worse in its place: rampant, juvenile incivility. We are Frat boy/Gangsta Nation. Idiocracy.
--The heroic class displayed by the Rutgers women.

I think the most bizarre moment in the whole ordeal was the CNN camera vigil in front of the New Jersey governor’s mansion. Imus had gone there to meet with the women and apologize “privately;” CNN seemed to want to give this meeting the gravity of the JFK funeral. The surrealism was cranked up even higher when it came out later that Gov. Corzine, racing through the Jersey night in his government SUV to make this historic klieg-lighted encounter, had crashed on the Turnpike and nearly been killed.

Second most bizarre were the reports that the right-wing was terrified that this was but the first move in a vast liberal conspiracy to bring down all of talk radio: “Is Rush Limbaugh next?”

Finally, though, I think Slate culture critic Stephen Metcalf summed it up best in trying to account for “the I-man”’s immense popularity over all these years:
“How iced-out in the bedroom and thumbed-under at work are America’s commuters,” Metcalf wrote, “that they find drive-time radio funny?”